This is a tough topic to tackle, especially since learning words in hiragana may or may not end up confusing you when you move to Kanji. I know it has been for me, and I have decided that learning kanji + vocab at the same time is working better.

But, everyone is different, and sometimes I just want to know words, too. So I found this site:
Vocab Lists

mandolin wrote:This is a tough topic to tackle, especially since learning words in hiragana may or may not end up confusing you when you move to Kanji. I know it has been for me, and I have decided that learning kanji + vocab at the same time is working better.

But, everyone is different, and sometimes I just want to know words, too. So I found this site:Vocab Lists

Hope this helps some...

I use that site for vocab lists. It is pretty good I guess, but I wish that they would provide printable lists as the lists they have are too wide for 81/2 X 11 paper. I find that site very useful though because I need to expand my vocab before I learn more kanji so I can understand Japanese better. I want to focus on spoken Japanese before learning anymore Kanji.

I wouldn't recommend starting with anime, as it doesn't build a good base for vocabulary. I would get a book like "japanese for busy people" or the word lists for the proficiency exam and start from there.

Unless all you want to be able to say is "crystal tiara power" and "I am so cool, I will beat you down!" But hey, everyone's different.

Seriously, don't learn from anime until you have a decent grasp of the language. It's pretty bad when a guy comes into class and starts emulating his fave anime character... who happens to be a girl.. who speaks like a girl... in kansai ben.

Ummmm there's this site that helps you translate your Japanese words into romanjii and visa versa, It's a pretty good tool to have. But the bad part is, they don't acurately spell out the word in romanjii they do it how it sounds. Check it ouf it you want too. It's a Japanese-English Dictionary online and best part is, it's free! http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/cgi-bin/jedi-inon

Last edited by Apollo on Sat 10.08.2005 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

MY SIG IMAGE WAS OVER 100 PIXELS HIGH AND THE ADMINS SMOTE IT WITH A HAMMER OF SMITING.

get a course book that teaches words in an order so you can form sentences 'japanese for busy people' is good but 'minna no hinongo' is better i think. once you can say simple sentences you can widen your vocab to say more interesting things.

mandolin wrote:This is a tough topic to tackle, especially since learning words in hiragana may or may not end up confusing you when you move to Kanji. I know it has been for me, and I have decided that learning kanji + vocab at the same time is working better.

How do you figure that? You should know how to write practically every Kanji/jukugo that you learn in Hiragana since that is also the pronunciation of it.

"Learning to write words in only kana may or may not end up confusing you when you decide to try writing out sentences. Sentences in only kana appear extremely long and hard to understand, and this might frustrate you. Eventually, you will learn that kanji is what helps to break up sentences into manageable and legible parts. At that point, you will probably decide to try to learn kanji yourself, and you will have to try and take the words you know in hiragana, and replace them with kanji. This is further complicated by things like suffixes can conjugations, which are rather too in-depth to list here."

That's a lot more wordy than I wanted to be, and I did not want to presuppose anything specific. She may not have problems with sentences written in all kana, for instance. But she may still have problems identifying which words are used with which kanji. Or perhaps something entirely different could cause her frustration. Thus, all the little things that led me to MY decision are irrelevant to her at this stage. All I wanted to accomplish was to let her know two things:

1. Frustration can happen to anyone. (expressed with empathy, as I have frequently become frustrated for numerous reasons)

2. There are many paths to the same destination (fluency). (illustrated by an example of how I overcame my frustration by trying out new methods, and found one that works for me).

The only thing I would change in my post to add clarity would be "[snip]... since learning words in hiragana ONLY may or may not... [snip]".

I never suggested that she skip on learning to write kanji readings in hiragana all together.

Learning vocabulary is very important, but having the right method of learining new words is even better. I suggest to learn the words that you use everyday. Write all the words you used in your daily activites and try to say them in japanese once in a while, so that your're learning the word(s). Once you know the word for a particular object,people,or place, try to include the right kana for that word. For example: lets say you are outside and you see a car. The word for car is 'kuruma'. Knowing that the word for car is kuruma, you will then fill in the correct kana for kuruma. Learning the words in romanji first or learning kana and using kana will be up to you.